A yearly roundup

With your support, we had an incredible 2025— and we’re so excited to head into 2026 with you. 

In lieu of your regularly scheduled weekly roundup, here’s a yearly one, highlighting some of the fun we’ve had this year.

THE HOTTEST TOPICS OF THE YEAR

We post a lot, but a handful of subjects stood out this year.

All things DOGE resonated with readers, but Anyone Can Push Updates to the DOGE.gov Website was our most-read story of the year. 

Looking closely at a stock photo of Mike Waltz resulted in another hugely viral scoop: Mike Waltz Accidentally Reveals Obscure App the Government Is Using to Archive Signal Messages. Oh, and then the app was hacked, a story that also made our top 10 of the year. Oops! 

Speaking of hacks: We broke the news of the Tea app hack, another massively viral story this year, and then the second breach, and then the background of the company, including its Silicon Valley CEO. 

Speaking of CEOs: Leaders behaving badly was a big theme this year. Zuck, of course, is on that list, and his bemoaning leakers made the top stories of the year, as did the turmoil from within Meta.

And speaking of... inner turmoil? The sweep of age verification laws across the US remains a hot topic you’re still into, 25 states down.

IMPACT HIGHLIGHT

One story we’ve stayed on all year, that’s resulted in continuous, positive change across the country the more we cover it: Flock. Covering this surveillance tech and camera company as it has spread from small-town police departments to partnerships with DHS has resulted in communities pushing back against surveillance and privacy-invading technology in their neighborhoods—and in many places, they’re winning. Read all of our Flock coverage, here.

404 IN THE WILD

Since our last In the Wild segment in October, we’ve done a handful of appearances on other pods and web sites.

We were featured in Zack Whittaker’s This Week In Security as a last-minute gift option alongside many other wonderful indie media outlets. If you’re an extreme procrastinator like I am, you could still give the gift of a 404 Media subscription as like, a New Year’s gift or something.

Emanuel went on Marketplace to talk about libraries and tariffs. 

Joseph talked about Flock on Slate’s What Next: TBD and our Flock reporting was featured in MS NOW. He also went on WNYC to talk about ICE spotting apps.

I talked to The Objective about sustainable business models, and Jason went on KQED to discuss deepfakes.

If you’d like us to come speak at your event, on your panel, or at your college, check out our Brightsight speaking pages: Jason, Joseph, Emanuel, and Sam.

PARTY LIKE IT’S 2025

We got to meet even more of you IRL this year than ever, across three cities: Austin during SXSW, Los Angeles for a DIY hackerspace party, and New York City at our second anniversary shindig. 

At our first SXSW, our friends at Flipboard let us take over the Fediverse House for a panel on AI slop, where Brian Merchant joined us on stage. You can watch the panel here. 

In LA, the kind folks of Rip.Space had us over to host a party that made the building rock. We ran our first-ever IRL livestream event where we talked about ICE and surveillance in the city specifically, and Dexter Thomas of the Kill Switch podcast joined us, which you can watch here. Pics and a full recap is here!

And in NYC, we held our second annual anniversary celebration, where new and old friends packed the house at Farm.One to watch our first live podcast recording and yes, again, rage. A debrief of the event is here, and the podcast is in your feeds and on Youtube. (Maybe next year we’ll figure out this whole A/V thing, lol)

If you have event ideas or a space to host our next live gathering, hit us up! We’re hoping to see you all in more places in 2026.    

MORE FOR YOUR EARS

You may have noticed some new voices in the 404 Media Podcast feed in the last few weeks. We recently expanded the pod to two episodes a week (plus a bonus episode now and then, a perk for subscribers at the Supporter level). Those extra episodes every week feature one-on-one interviews with one of us at 404 in conversation with someone doing cool things on our respective beats. Check out the entire series on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube.

OUR FIRST EVER PRINT PUBLICATION

We made a zine! Our pal Ernie Smith laid it out beautifully, and of course he didn’t do it any normal ol’ way—read his walkthrough of how he did it in Linux on his blog, Tedium. It was printed at an LA risograph print shop, which Jason gets into some of the behind the scenes of in this Behind the Blog. If you ordered a zine, it’ll get on its way to you in the next few weeks. If you haven’t yet, you still can. 

And if you’re in LA this Sunday, you’ll get a chance to grab one IRL at the LA Fights Back show at the Regent Theater, with proceeds from the show going to The Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights. 

Tickets here.

WHAT ELSE? 

If you want a full recap of what we’ve done in the last year, check out our two-year anniversary recap. We’ve done a lot more in just the four months since then, including launching a weekly interview podcast series (in addition to the regular weekly news show), welcomed the incredibly talented Evy Kwong on socials, and started several more projects and partnerships we’ll be able to tell you about very soon.

Thank you for making all of this possible. We’ll see you on Monday.